In April I contributed a piece to the Antiracism and America series, a collaboration between the Guardian and American University’s Antiracist Research and Policy Center. In the piece, I explore the U.S.-Mexico border as a solution, not a problematic site, and challenge to the nation’s long history of white supremacy. In the popular imagination and political […]

I am delighted to share that Carolina Miranda, an art critic for the Los Angeles Times, reviewed my piece, Mexico’s City of dogs, which appeared in Al Jazeera America for Nieman Storyboard. In her critique, “How Michelle Garcia told the story of Juárez, a city lost to violence, through its dogs,” Miranda writes: It is a […]

In Feb. 2017, The New York Times’ Michael Powell selected my reported essay, “My Name is Alex” for the Times’ feature, “What We’re Reading,” which highlights “great stories from around the web.” The piece appeared in the Fall 2015 issue of the Oxford American and was later included in the magazine’s picks of Best Essays in […]

This piece took ten years to place. I first drafted some of the arguments found in my new piece, Trumpworld, in 2006 while I was working at The Washington Post. Then, as now, political chatter centered on border security issues, an “invasion” via the U.S. Mexico border. Politicians and the press considered the function of the border […]

_ This piece seems to be increasingly relevant in this, ahem, interesting, election season. Earlier in the year a “taco war” broke out between Austin and San Antonio after a clearly confused New York-based writer crowned Austin the home of the “breakfast taco.” The outbreak of rhetorical war contained much more than simply a dispute over a […]

In Summer 2013, I came across a boy waving down passing cars for help along a remote country road in South Texas. He had no way of knowing it, but the boy was stranded in the middle of Brooks County, a large swath of ranch land that has become a cemetery for lost migrants. I picked […]

The border is not just a place, it’s an idea– so begins my piece in the The Texas Observer’s 60th Anniversary Issue. The thought flashed across my mind as I traveled from ciudad Juárez into el Paso, and then through Del Rio and down into the Rio Grande Valley. The editors asked me to try and […]